The Curious Failure of 'The Time Traveler’s Wife'

Posted on August 16, 2009 - 10:17am by michael The Time Traveler’s Wife is exactly what I expected it to be. I absolutely hated the book, so it follows naturally that I should hate the movie. So before you read on, I should warn you that I am leaps and bounds outside the target audience who, as I’ll explain in a second, remain slightly mysterious to me. Nevertheless, I will attempt to write an objective review and then let you make your own decision. The movie, first of all, has a premise that dwells in the gleeful lunacy of all time travel movies, except that this movie has nothing to do with time travel. It’s purely a love story, but uses involuntary time travel as a catalyst to create conflict. But for me, the biggest conflict was trying to figure out who that target audience was. My best guess, after seeing the movie, is middle-aged women pining for loves lost or loves never realized, simply because younger women surely (hopefully) understand the inherent folly of marrying someone who time travels sporadically and involuntarily and, it should follow, would know better than to do such a thing and then complain about it later. And men – well, sorry guys but there really isn’t much for any of you in here. So a 6-year-old girl named Clare is picnicking by herself in the meadow near her fabulously wealthy parents’ mansion when suddenly a naked man appears nearby and asks her for her picnic blanket. She happily obliges, and then shakes his hand and has a little conversation with him – this full-grown, ass-naked man, and just like that we realize just how little her parents ever thought to teach her about simple things like Don’t talk to strangers. These must be some really busy people. But it’s ok, because the man knew her name, and then he not only claimed to be a time traveler, but he proved it by vanishing before her eyes. This is clearly a trust-worthy stranger. In fact, when I have kids myself, I plan to teach them never to talk to strangers unless the stranger can vanish into thin air. If that’s the case, then they can hang with that stranger even if he’s standing before them just as naked as the day he was born. [caption id="attachment_50894" align="alignleft" width="395" caption="The Time Travler's Future Wife."][/caption] There's a scene later in the movie where this Clare viciously berates this man – Henry, his name is - for “tricking a little girl” into falling in love with him. They’re married by the time this argument takes place, and when we see this scene I can’t help thinking that it was within, I believe, less than 30 seconds of meeting her as a 6-year-old girl that he told her the whole truth about himself. It seems hardly fair to call this immediate and total honesty some kind of trickery, but no matter. Now, I might sound like I’m nitpicking here with these two particular scenes, but I only explain them because they are two examples of why I find myself without any ability to enjoy the film on any level. The movie doesn’t support one single scrap of logic or realism – even science fiction logic or confectionary romance realism – which is why the whole thing to me is unable to reach even the low level of some kind of half-baked romantic fantasy. On the other hand, I don’t intend to argue that there is no place for romantic fantasy, even half-baked romantic fantasy. For example, The Notebook (also starring Rachel McAdams) is romantic fantasy done very, very right. It is 100% romance, 100% chick flick, and it is absolutely fantastic. I loved it. And maybe you could call something like Message In A Bottle a half-baked romantic fantasy. It’s a bit of a derivative tear-jerker, but hey, I cried like a baby the first time I saw it. Judge me at will. But The Time Traveler’s Wife, man. This thing fails even as a date movie – the always-faithful fall-back for bad romances. Here, let me give you an example. In front of me in the theater there was a guy who was seeing the movie with his girlfriend. They were holding hands and she had her head on his shoulder and was running her fingers up and down his arm while they watched the movie together. I had time to notice all this because I had already read everything that was happening onscreen, you see. Anyway, about 30 minutes into the movie I looked back at them and the guy was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging down slightly like he was thinking really hard about something. He sat like this for a minute or two before the girl leaned over and whispered something into his ear, and he shrugged and shook his head – ‘No honey, nothing’s wrong…’ -  and then flopped back in his seat, his fingers interlaced in his lap. The girl looked at him for a few seconds, and then sat back in her own seat, her arms folded across her belly. [caption id="attachment_50897" align="alignleft" width="353" caption="Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana spend a remarkable amount of time staring at each other in this movie. "][/caption] Now, I watched this whole development with marked amusement, because I understood exactly how he felt, and why. For myself, I was fidgeting like a 9-year-old in church, but at least I didn’t have my girlfriend there getting pissed at me. 45 minutes later, a group of five teenagers stood up and walked out of the theater, and the couple in front of me were laughing together. Whether it was because the guy had started to enjoy the movie or the girl started hating it along with him I can’t say, but I have my own theory. Let me give you the basics of the plot. You see, this man Henry has what’s called a “Chrono-impairment.” That’s a genetic deficiency, sort of like fibromyalgia or lactose intolerance, except this one causes him to travel through time at the whim of, well, sort of randomly. Certain things trigger it, like drinking and excitement, and he tends to gravitate toward important or meaningful times in his life. This is important in preventing him from traveling to strange locations or to times in the distant future or distant past – basically anything that would be interesting in a real time travel movie. [caption id="attachment_50898" align="alignright" width="359" caption="This, for example, is a different Henry than the one that will soon, and briefly, join Clare for their wedding night."][/caption] Because of this, he runs into people like Clare and their daughter and his mother and himself at different points in all of their lives, so you will basically be spending most of the movie trying to follow which Henry is visiting Clare and at which point in his and her life and, importantly, where that Henry has just come from. Granted, the actual plot of the movie is not very hard to follow, despite the plethora of highly confusing elements, so you won’t spend the whole movie being totally lost. We have Clare, being a non-time-traveler, as sort of a rock to base our own linear understanding on, but author Audrey Niffenegger’s weak writing ability comes across constantly in the shallow dialogue, and the cheese factor is astronomical. Somewhere in the story is a clever idea, maybe sufficient for a short story or even a novella, but misguided ambition has led to a barrage of rewrites and revisions, fleshing everything out long past the breaking point and  turning the whole thing into a bloated, cloying mess. [caption id="attachment_50900" align="alignleft" width="379" caption="Henry tries to work up the courage to ask Clare to marry him before he gets beamed back to her childhood again."][/caption] Now for the good stuff. The Goods, you might say. Eric Bana, as Henry, looks great and does the nude scenes with deadly seriousness even while the audience chuckles at the quickly cooling gimmick. This man definitely has the capacity to do romance. Rachel McAdams, playing Clare, is stunningly beautiful as always, although her delivery of her lines is a little too effective, infusing the material with more depth than it can support and getting laughs at times when her performance should be the most serious – like late in the movie when she angrily tells Henry that all she wants is “a normal life.” Young lady I’m sorry, but if you wanted a normal life, you shouldn’t have married a time traveler. But that’s weak writing, not weak acting. McAdams performs nicely, as does Bana, and they do have chemistry onscreen, but their seriousness amidst the hurricane of foolishness around them is just begging to be mocked. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer could make their entire next movie based on this one alone (since their wholesale lack of talent prevents them from coming up with anything original), and maybe just call it Time Travel Date Movie. Or they could just call it Disaster Movie 2. See if they can outdo the original in sheer, unfiltered crappiness. [caption id="attachment_50899" align="alignright" width="390" caption="Clare enjoying a romantic wedding night with her new husband's ring."][/caption] Before I end I should tell you that The Time Traveler's Wife is not without its effective scenes. There are one or two warm moments between Henry and Clare which may even affect a flicker of emotion in the audience, and there is an absolutely wonderful scene where Henry, as a man in his late 30s, meets his own mother – who died in a car crash when he was a little boy - on a subway. They have a conversation where he is beside himself to be able to speak to his long-lost mother, while she has no idea who he is. If Niffenegger had been able to come up with more material like this, the movie could have been one of the best of the year. Sadly, it’s the only scene of this caliber in the entire movie. But despite all this, I still hesitate to call The Time Traveler’s Wife an utter, complete failure. It has it’s moments and the actors turn in honest performances, but it’s little more than a mildly curious misfire. It’s like shooting the ball from half court where you miss completely but just nick the net under the basket. It’s not a total airball, but you still don’t get any points for it. The Bean Meter [caption id="attachment_50901" align="aligncenter" width="76" caption="1 Bean out of 5."][/caption]